The New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market have each agreed to let Alibaba Group Holding’s founder and senior management team have control over the board of the Chinese e-commerce giant if it seeks to list its stock on the exchanges, Alibaba said.

The approvals mean fewer hurdles for a possible U.S. initial public offering by Alibaba. The deal, if it happens, could be the largest Internet IPO since Facebook Inc.’s market debut last year.

A new round of finger-pointing will kick off Thursday morning when a House committee grills four contractors involved in the development of HealthCare.gov, the troubled site where uninsured consumers are supposed to sign up for health insurance.

CGI Federal, the lead contractor for HealthCare.gov, said the federal agency in charge of the project was “the ultimate responsible party for the end-to-end performance of the overall” health exchange, according to testimony released Wednesday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I am an inveterate Tweeter. I use Twitter more than any communications medium other than email. I check it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and about a billion times in between. (Assume that for every sentence in this article, I’ve refreshed Twitter three times.) I’ve tweeted my wedding, my kids’ births, and my major surgeries.

I have joked with my wife – who, like most sensible people, doesn’t use Twitter but loves Facebook – that by neglecting the microblogging service, she’s missing out on the most interesting facet of my personality. The sad thing about this is that, most days, it isn’t really a joke: @fmanjoo is usually a lot more fun than Farhad Manjoo.

A senior BlackBerry Ltd. executive who was in charge of the largely unsuccessful PlayBook tablet is leaving the company.

David J. Smith, an executive vice president in charge of mobile computing, has resigned for personal reasons, a BlackBerry spokesman said. The move happened within the past few weeks, said a person familiar with the matter.

The spokesman added that Mr. Smith “continues to come into work every day and is committed to working with BlackBerry through a proper transition.”

A Chinese government research institute hit out at Google Inc.’s Android smartphone operating system, arguing that China is too reliant on the platform and accusing the search giant of using its dominance to discriminate against local companies.

The criticism highlights continuing tension between Google and the Chinese government three years after the Mountain View, Calif., company said it wouldn’t comply with Chinese Internet restrictions and pulled its servers out of mainland China.

Last year, trying to show how the toy industry could remain relevant in the tablet age, Hasbro Inc. unveiled an iPad-enhanced version of its classic Game of Life. Instead of spinning a wheel in the center of the board game to take a turn, players spun a wheel on the iPad.

The idea bombed.

And it wasn’t alone. More than 90 percent of the so-called app toys that were trotted out last year sold poorly, estimates Jim Silver, editor in chief of timetoplaymag.com, a consumer and trade website.